How UNC Charlotte created a Coordinated Care Network to manage student success campaigns

LeeFredrick Bowen

Director of Advising System, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of EAB.

UNC Charlotte has the second-highest undergraduate population in the state system. Advising here is a decentralized model. Student success data exists overwhelmingly in multiple decentralized systems assigned to multiple units with variations for access and reporting structures that make it difficult to centralize proactive outreach.

This capstone project focused on creating a Coordinated Care Network to coordinate the centralization of proactive student success campaigns. This includes merging student data sets from various systems, leveraging data for customization in targeting specific populations, and expanding our reach while avoiding overloading advising units.

Charlotte has conducted four proactive advising campaigns each fall/spring semester for numerous years now based on student success data. The campaigns are:

1. Returning Concern: Leverages previous term data
2. Early Alerts: Leverages faculty progress report data
3. Low Midterm Grades: Leverages faculty midterm reporting data
4. Non-Registered: Leverages enrollment data for the next term.

Though the coordination for these campaigns is centralized, the criteria for certain campaigns is decentralized and varies among advising units due to capacity issues.

This capstone focused on the Returning Concerned Campaign, which has the most decentralized criteria in identifying students of concern and has been one of the most unpopular campaigns among advisors (due to limited capacity given the time year it is assigned to be launched, which is the beginning of the term). This is a time when advising is already overwhelmed by numerous contacts with their students prior to the last day of drop/add. Criteria tends to be set on the most critical students in need due to advising capacity issues versus including many other types of concerns such as low enrollment of credit hours or earned/attempt ratios. Therefore, creating a Coordinated Care Network that includes additional units to support our efforts and possibly expand them was the primary goal of this project.

The additional unit that was included to tackle this campaign was our University Center of Academic Excellence that runs tutoring/mentoring/academic probation programs. The project redesigned this campaign to assign the UCAE as the primary designee to proactively outreach to our Returning Concern population. The advising units were no longer primarily responsible for this outreach, but we still support the continuation of advising units conducting their own customized campaigns that make sense for their prospective units. The project coordinated expanding the criteria of concern to include significantly more students for outreach by providing them opportunities to participate in mentoring/probation programs.

The project compared data on students who met the old criteria model with the new criteria model for assessment. The old model would have given us around 1,400 students for outreach, but the new model had given us around 4,000 students for outreach. Our average student response rates for this campaign in previous years have been consistently around one-third of the targeted group. Our outcome for fall 2023 still showed around one-third responded from the old model, but one-third also responded in the new model.

This means that expanding the number of students to outreach still expands the number of students that receive academic treatment even though the response rates seem to consistently linger around one-third. We reach more students by simply outreaching to more students and preparing for one-third to participate. The project included additional data from other systems to help expand our definition for responsiveness and resulted in a 6% increase in our response rate.

Our primary goals were to improve and expand capacity, maintain or increase average campaign student response rates, and include additional student response data elements that were not used in assessing previous campaigns. We succeeded in meeting all three goals for the Fall 2023 Returning Concerned Campaign.